CHAPTER 9 #2
“Yes,” I said, before I'd even finished deciding. “I want you there.”
He glanced back once, nodded, and faced forward again. I watched the city slide past the window—the first time I had moved through it since arriving—looking exactly as I remembered and nothing like it at all.
The clinic in Nishi-Azabu didn't look like a hospital. It looked like a very quiet, very expensive house, all pale wood and soft lighting, and the receptionist bowed to me like I was someone important instead of someone borrowed for the morning.
My stomach had been in a knot since breakfast, and it wasn't the good kind of nerves.
I'd promised myself I was done with rooms like this one, and I hadn't broken that promise once in two years.
I stood in the hallway a second longer than I needed to, my thumb finding my mother's ring, before I made myself walk in.
Dr. Lise Andersen was younger than I'd expected, blond hair scraped back, reading glasses pushed up into it, and she shook my hand hard, like a woman used to shaking hands with people who needed convincing of something.
“You're the translator.” English, brisk and warm at once. “Thank God. My Japanese is four words and one of them is beer.”
“I'll try to cover the rest.”
“I like her already,” she said, to the room, to no one, and then, “Call me Lise. Nobody has time for all four syllables at eight in the morning.” And then we got to work.
The patient was three years old. Her name was Emi, and she had a small hole in her heart that an ultrasound had found the previous spring.
Her mother sat with Emi in her lap through the whole appointment, one hand pressed flat over her daughter's chest, like she could hold the hole closed herself if she just pressed hard enough.
Lise listened with her stethoscope, murmured something to herself in Danish, quick and half under her breath, lille hul, small hole, a habit she seemed to fall into without noticing. Then she turned to me, back in English.
“Tell her the murmur's softer than it was in March. That's a very good sign. Small VSDs like this one close on their own most of the time, especially at this age. I don't see anything today that changes our plan. No surgery. Just watching, for now, and another scan in six months.”
I turned to Emi's mother and chose my words as I always did, slowly, carefully, the way my own mother had taught me a good word could carry weight a careless one never would.
“Oto ga mae yori chiisaku natte imasu.” (The sound is smaller than before.) “Sore wa totemo ii shirase desu. Ima wa mada shujutsu wa hitsuyou arimasen. Rokkagetsu go ni, mou ichido kensa shimasu.” (It's very good news. She doesn't need surgery right now. In six months, we check again.)
Emi's mother went very still, and then her whole face broke open, and she started to cry right there in the little padded chair, both hands over her mouth. Emi looked up at her with the confused patience of a three-year-old who didn't yet understand that crying could mean the opposite of sad.
“Arigatou gozaimasu,” the mother said, over and over, through her fingers. “Hontou ni arigatou gozaimasu.” (Thank you. Thank you so much.)
My own throat went tight, and I looked down at my blank notebook for a second, at nothing, just to keep my voice steady enough to finish the appointment properly.
Lise watched the whole exchange without understanding a single word of it and somehow understood all of it anyway. When we were done, Emi bundled back into her stroller, she caught my arm at the door.
“You didn't just translate the words,” she said. “You translated the news. There's a difference. Most people don't know there's a difference.”
“It's the only part of the job I've ever really cared about.”
“Come work in Copenhagen.” She said it half joking, and handed me a card anyway. “I mean it. Good doctors are replaceable. Good translators like you are not.”
I laughed, surprised, and slipped the card into my cardigan pocket.
That was when Emi's mother caught my hand on the way out, both of hers wrapped around it, and said something too fast and too full of feeling for me to translate even to myself.
Just gratitude. Plain and enormous. My eyes went hot and I had to blink hard against it.
Hiro was there before I'd fully registered wanting him to be, a steady hand at my elbow, saying nothing, like he could always feel the exact moment a person needed a hand instead of a word.
The oyabun was already in the back seat when I climbed in this time, and he didn't ask how it went. He just handed me a bottle of water and watched my hands while I drank it, because they were shaking, a fine constant tremor I hadn't noticed until the cap was between my fingers.
“Adrenaline,” I said, embarrassed, like I needed to explain my own body to him. “It happens after. I forget every time how much it happens after.”
He didn't reach for my hand. He waited, patient, until the shaking eased on its own, and when I looked up he was watching me with something that wasn't pity at all. Something warmer than that. Something close to pride, for a thing he'd had no part in.
“It went well,” I told him.
“I heard.” When I asked how, he tilted his head toward Hiro in the front seat, who'd apparently reported the whole thing in the ninety seconds it took to load the car, and I laughed, really laughed, for the first time all day, and something in his shoulders came down an inch I don't think I was meant to notice.
I showered off the whole day, the antiseptic smell of the clinic and the salt from the two times I'd almost cried, and put on the softest thing in my suitcase, a cotton dress the color of weak tea. My hair was damp when I came out, and for once I didn't care.
Dinner was quiet. Good quiet. I ate more than I had in days, and afterward carried my tea to the tea room and sat on the red cushion, watching the lights of the city come on one tower at a time, like the whole skyline was waking up for the night shift.
He joined me a few minutes later, settling close but not touching, one arm's length away, a line he respected more than he'd ever respect an order.
“Hontou ni yoku yatta,” he said, watching the window instead of me, as though he wanted to give me room to take the praise without an audience. You did very well.
“Thank you.” I turned my cup once in my hands. “I want to do it again.”
He looked at me then. “You will.”
Another pause. The deliberate kind.
“If you wish it.”
“I wish it,” I said, and I meant it more plainly than I'd meant almost anything since I'd gotten here.
Not only the clinic. All of it. The cardigan that smelled like an apartment I didn't miss as much as I'd thought I would.
This room. This man beside me, who waited exactly as long as I needed him to and not one breath longer.
He nodded, like that settled something for both of us, and we sat there until the tea went cold in my hands and, for once, I didn't mind at all.
Later, when I changed for bed, I caught myself in the mirror on the closet door and actually stopped to look.
My hair was down, damp waves gone a little wild the way they did when I skipped the blow-dryer.
A flush left over from the shower, or the tea room, or both.
I was wearing an old college T-shirt I'd found at the bottom of my suitcase, the collar gone soft and stretched, and I looked tired in the good way, the way you look after a day that cost you something and gave you something back in equal measure.
I liked her. The woman in the mirror. I hadn't liked her, not really, not like this, in longer than I wanted to count.
I was still looking at her, at myself, at whoever this new version of me had quietly become somewhere between Boston and this room, when I heard it.
A knock. Soft. Considered, like he'd thought about it before he did it.
Not the corridor door.
The connecting door.
My heart did something complicated and fast against my ribs. I set down my hairbrush. I crossed the room in four steps I didn't remember deciding to take, and I didn't let myself hesitate with my hand on the wood the way I had the very first night.
I opened it.